How Businesses Use Ruler to Improve Their ROI

Laura Caveney
1st November 2021

Are you looking to increase your return on investment? This is one tricky marketing metric to calculate and improve. In this blog, we spoke to current users of Ruler Analytics to see how it’s supported them to improve their ROI. 

Return on investment is a difficult metric for most marketers. But it’s one that is essential to understanding what’s working, what isn’t and most importantly gives you insight into where you’re getting the most bang for your buck. 

Digital marketing is highly saturated, and getting cut-through is getting harder and harder. As marketers use more and more channels and promote more and more content, they’re creating more data to track and analyse. 

Related: Why is tracking marketing ROI so difficult? 

But where does all that data go? Well, for the most part, it gets locked away in certain apps or lost in the cloud. 

We spoke to businesses currently using Ruler Analytics to find out how it’s helped them track and improve their return on investment. 

🚀 Pro Tip

Want to try marketing attribution for yourself? Ruler Analytics is the best visitor-level tracking software out there. With it, you’ll be able to track, evidence and optimise your marketing campaigns which means more sales for you at a fraction of the cost.

Find out more about how Ruler attributes revenue to your marketing here. 

How to track return on investment in Ruler Analytics 

If you didn’t already know, Ruler is a marketing attribution tool that supports marketers to track users through the full customer journey so that they can see which touchpoints are working to reach, engage and close leads. 

How Ruler works can be split into 3 easy steps. 

And remember, 100% of businesses using Ruler, when asked, said that the tool allows them to prove their marketing works to drive revenue. 

Tracking user touchpoints with Ruler 

Ruler can be integrated with your website with just a small piece of code. Then, Ruler will be able to track visitors to your website. 

Ruler will be able to scrape key data from these users including their referral source and other key source data like GCLID, keyword data and more. 

Every time a user visits your website, Ruler will track them and store customer journey data for each visitor. 

Let’s use an example to help explain. 

Ella visits your website for the first time via an organic search. Ruler tracks her visit and records the data including which pages she engaged with and her source. 

A few days later, Ella revisits your site via a direct search. Ruler uses first-party cookies to track Ella and link her visit to her previous session on your website. This session’s data is added to her customer journey. 

Ella customer journey

No matter how many times Ella engages with your website, Ruler will track and store the information you need to decipher how she’s engaging with your content. 

Tracking leads with Ruler 

If you work in B2B marketing, then chances are you’re generating leads for your business. 

In this case, you’re likely seeing conversions occur via form fills, phone call, live chat and more. 

There are key difficulties with this. Tracking lead count is one thing, but linking a lead to a website session is another. 

With Ruler, you can track both. 

Let’s return to our example. 

Ella has visited your website twice now. On her third visit via an organic search, she filled in a form. Perhaps she downloaded an eBook based on your blog content. 

organic search customer journey

At this point, without Ruler, you would see Ella in your CRM. The data you would have on her would include what she provided in the form. 

With Ruler, you’ll be able to see the previous two sessions and how she engaged with your content. 

On conversion, Ruler always fires your lead data to your chosen CRM. You’ll also be able to log into Ruler itself and see individual customer journeys. 

Related: How to view full customer journeys in Ruler Analytics 

Tracking revenue with Ruler 

Ok, so we can track touchpoints and leads. But while we’ve solved the disconnect between your CRM and your website, what about ‘closing the loop’? 

To close the loop means to link your closed revenue from sales back to your marketing. 

When you’re just counting leads and have limited lead data, you can’t definitively prove where closed leads came from. 

But with Ruler, you can. 

Ella at the moment is a lead in your CRM. She’s now being nurtured to see if she can be converted into a sale. 

Since she downloaded an eBook, she is added to an email cadence and after a few days receives a personalised email with further details surrounding the topic of the chosen eBook. 

ella-set-customer-journeys-ruleranalytics.com

She clicks on your website and calls your business. On that call, she converts. 

Without Ruler, you would only know that Ella was a lead and that she converted via phone call. While you would know she had received and maybe clicked on your email campaign, you couldn’t definitively prove that’s what converted her. Plus, this is just one view. What about the organic search that began her customer journey? Or the organic search that led to her becoming a lead? 

When closed revenue is locked away in your CRM, you can’t accurately attribute it back to the channels that influenced your sales. 

But with Ruler, you can. Ruler integrates with hundreds of marketing tools like Google Analytics so that you can break the data disconnect. 

In our example, Ruler would be able to scrape the revenue data assigned to Ella in your CRM and send it to Google Analytics where it would be accurately attributed based on their own attribution models. 

How to improve ROI with Ruler 

Ok, so now we know exactly how Ruler works to better track your users, leads and customers so that you can link revenue to marketing. 

But how does this help you improve your ROI? 

We reached out to some of our current customers to see how it’s worked for them. 

100% of businesses using Ruler, when asked, said that the tool has helped them increase their ROI. 

improve roi with Ruler Analytics

Track every conversion and accurately attribute them 

With a tool like Ruler Analytics in place, you can view simple reports which show exactly how much revenue marketing channels, campaigns, ads and keywords are driving. 

Stephanie Henderson, Senior Account Manager at Distract said, “Since we started using Ruler as a tool for our advertising campaigns, we’ve seen Ruler track and attribute our conversions. Ruler is an essential tool that helps us prove ROI to our clients, and it makes day-to-day reporting and breaking down critical metrics so much easier.

“Having Ruler on a site allows us to attribute phone calls back to our paid search platforms when we would usually lose tracking, such as when users call from a landline. This allows us to see which campaigns are performing best to make decisions on budget changes, accurately report to the client which services are getting enquiries, and keep the ads relevant for the users searching.  

“Without Ruler, we would lose half of our tracked conversions, which could mean we make the wrong decisions and turn off campaigns that are actually driving high quality, converting traffic.”

Get accurate data 

Do you use offline conversions or offline marketing that you find tricky to track? We found that 100% of marketers who use events to drive leads struggle to track them. 

In fact, we found marketers struggle to track a lot of channels and conversion types. 

✏️ Note

Read the full report into marketing reporting and attribution and see what challenges marketers face. 

Chris Hirlemann, Head of Data at Sleeping Giant Media added, “We use ROI to help tie the online leads to offline sales. This allowed us to identify which channels drove the hottest leads and actually calculate ROI.” 

With Ruler providing clear and accurate data on what is and isn’t driving online and offline sales, you can confidently turn on and off marketing initiatives to positively affect your bottom line. 

Get granular with your data 

While you want to be able to see how much revenue channels like paid is bringing in to better evidence your impact, you need to get more granular than this. 

With Ruler in place, you can break down your marketing success on a campaign, ad and even keyword level. 

Jimmy Tran, Business Development Director at Morgan Pryce added, “We are picking up on average 2 to 3 dropped calls a month through Ruler, this is tracked on a keyword level. This is next level Intel that allows us to do better follows armed with more information.” 

Wrapping up 

Ruler has a lot to offer. We consistently support our customers to prove and improve their return on investment. With Ruler in place, you can cut costs and grow your business by pinpointing what works. 

Data-driven marketing doesn’t need to be a pipedream anymore with a tool like Ruler in place. Book a demo to see the tool in action, or read more about what you can get access to in Ruler. 

revenue attribution marketing attribution - ruler analytics